Nevada County Picayune and Gurdon Times Newspaper Archive

Brad Harris Completes Workshop

Brad Harris, a senior at Prescott High School, has recently completed a workshop with 59 other student trainer candidates with Arkansas Sports Medicine and Orthopaedics.

The workshop is designed to introduce high school students to the athletic training profession and prepare them with skills that can be taken back to their high school. This, coupled with CPR and first-aid certification, gives them the ability of rendering assistance to the school's athletes and coaches. The course also allows the student to make a more educated decision toward their future occupation.

Each year Waddie Moore of the Arkansas Activities Association and Dr. Jimmy Tucker, current owner and director of Arkansas Sports Medicine, present a $500 scholarship to the top student and a $250 scholarship to the runner-up in the eight-week course. The scholarships are named in memory of Dr. Roger Clark, the founder of Arkansas Sports Medicine and originator of the workshop.

In it's tenth year, the Sports Medicine and Athletic Trainer Workshop has trained almost 600 students in the basics of sports injury recognition and evaluation, taping skills, first-aid and emergency procedures. Some of its graduates have gone on to successful careers at both the collegiate and professional level as well as private medical institutions.

With recent and devastating injuries of athletes, such as North Little Rock's Kenyana Tolbert and Detroit's Mike Utley, the role of the high school athletic trainer has increased, especially when teams do not have a physician at each game. The late Dr. Roger Clark saw this need and created the course in 1991.

Arkansas Sports Medicine is the official sports medicine provider for the Arkansas Activities Association.